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Notes on the Decline of Work

February 25, 2013 1:53 pmFebruary 25, 2013 1:53 pm

My Sunday column on America’s declining rates of workforce participation raised a provocative issue without addressing all the possible objections to my claim that this is something we should be concerned about. With that in mind, here are provisional responses to three questions that a careful reader might have about my argument.

Isn’t declining workforce participation just an inevitable consequence of America’s steady aging?
To some extent, yes. The Baby Boomers’ retirement always guaranteed that we would have a lower employment-to-population ratio in 2030 than in 1990. But demographic change alone doesn’t explain the trend we’re seeing: The workforce participation rate has been falling since the 1990s among prime working-age Americans, not just among the retired and near-retired, and for the population as a whole, there’s been a faster dropoff in employment than most analysts expected. (As you can see from the second chart in this post by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, this was true even before the Great Recession, though the projections and the reality have diverged more sharply since 2008.) What’s more, since the financial crash workforce participation actually actually been going up among Americans 55 and older, as more people postpone retirement or take part-time work to cushion the loss of savings. For today, at least, the trend away from employment is happening entirely among the under-55s.

Isn’t this just a male phenomenon – and isn’t it offset by women entering the workforce?
Twenty years ago, the answer was yes: Male labor force participation was dropping from its mid-century high, but female employment rates had risen steadily, and the overall effect was a larger workforce overall. But since the 1990s, as this Brookings paper explains, women’s labor force participation rates have leveled off and started dropping as well. And the female trend is now similar to the male trend (though not as sharp and swift), with younger, less-educated, unmarried women exiting the workforce in the largest numbers than their married, better-educated peers. In other words, it isn’t just an “opt-out” situation, with today’s wives leaving the workplace to raise children in larger numbers than their mothers did: That phenomenon may exist, but it isn’t the big driver of workforce decline.

Okay, but since we did have those decades of female employment growth, we have more people in the workforce overall than we did fifty years ago – and that’s likely to remain the case for some time. So what’s the big worry?
Well, the aging of America means that if working-age labor force participation keeps falling, we’ll be back to the levels of the 1950s much faster than anyone expected – and that workforce will be paying for a much more expensive entitlement system than the workforce of the Eisenhower era did. But as I said in the column, the economic costs of this trend may actually be manageable; it’s the social costs that are more worrisome. The non-employed working age Americans of the 1950s were mostly married women with wage-earning partners and children at home, with meant that they were members of income-producing economic units and embedded in strong social networks even if they weren’t holding down a 9-5 job. If today’s shrinking employment-to-population ratio were mostly a post-feminist variation on that theme, driven by a combination of married men staying home with the kids while their wives work and professional women taking time off during their prime childbearing years, then it would be less troubling that what we’re seeing today. But instead today’s decline in work is concentrated among the unmarried and less-educated — populations, that is, that tend to lack precisely the sources of social capital and economic advancement that participation in an even a low-paying job can help supply.

So while a decline in workforce participation is not inherently problematic, the fact that it’s happening among people who lack other sources of community and other means of socioeconomic ascent means that it’s more likely to compound existing trends toward stratification and atomization, hardening the lines of class and making individual lives unhappier even if the economic pie continues to grow. Hence my suggestion that this trend is of a piece with the declines in marriage and churchgoing and other forms of social “joining” — trends which aren’t likely to impoverish us, but whose consequences for opportunity and community and self-sufficiency threaten other, equally crucial, elements of the American Dream.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.